BPE = biphenyl ether
Their derivatives are used in plastics and as flame retardants in many different products. They're super common. Sorry no citation. I'm an organic chemist that have worked with those chemicals
I still don't get what you're saying no to... your link says 1 US cent is worth 0.83 yen, which I rounded to say 1 yen is worth about 1 cent. Are you saying I rounded up too much?
You're right that 1Tim 3:1-8 spells out the qualifications for an elder (presbyter in Greek), but the original Greek word employed there in 1Tim 3:1 is "episkope", or an overseer, which is the Biblical definition of a pastor or an elder. The word elder refers to the quality of the man (he's older in the faith and mature) that the pastor is. The word overseer refers to what that pastor does: overseeing ministries. The word pastor (literally, a shepherd) refers to how you do that overseeing: spiritually feed, oversee, and protect the flock. But they all more or less refer to the same thing because you can't be a pastor without being an elder.
The reasoning for the "housing allowance" exemption for clergy has less to do with religious cause than with the business cost exemption. I don't know about other religions, but Christian pastors are expected to be hospitable and open up their homes for ministry purposes (1Timothy 3:2). I'm sure there are corrupted churches and pastors out there who don't do that. But I am a pastor and my wife and I do open up our home for ministering to people whether it's for using it as a place for small group Bible studies, counseling, fellowship, or a place to stay if needed. So it's for the same reason why you can get exemption if you use your home (or at least part of your home) as an office for your non-religious business.
BTW, I currently don't get paid a penny by my church although I spend ~40 hours/week for ministry. I have a separate full time job (researcher at a university) to provide for my family.
Yes! As someone who makes living doing research in medicinal chemistry, I can tell you that here's how our daily conversation at work goes:
"So whose methodology do you want to follow in accomplishing XYZ?"
"The paper from the ZYX lab?"
"Nah, I don't trust those guys. Let's go with the ABC paper"
I think you have to be in the field to understand just how much of the "trust" factor there is in the daily operation of scientific research.
"If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed, rather than having two hands, to go to hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched— where 'THEIR WORM DOES NOT DIE AND THE FIRE IS NOT QUENCHED.' And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life lame, rather than having two feet, to be cast into hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched— where 'THEIR WORM DOES NOT DIE AND THE FIRE IS NOT QUENCHED.' And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, rather than having two eyes, to be cast into hell fire— where 'THEIR WORM DOES NOT DIE AND THE FIRE IS NOT QUENCHED.'"
(Mark 9:43-48 NKJV)
His emphasis: the condemned people's worm will not die (there is no more death! per Revelation 20) and their fire will not be quenched. ie they will suffer for eternity.
Jesus' teaching on hell:
"Then his master, after he had called him, said to him, 'You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Should you not also have had compassion on your fellow servant, just as I had pity on you?' And his master was angry, and delivered him to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him."
(Matthew 18:32-34 NKJV)
This is a parable that teaches about heaven and hell. His point is that when God is offering such generous forgiveness to you and you refuse to forgive, you won't be forgiven and you will pay for all that you owe. In my case, the debt of punishment for my sins was paid for by Christ on the cross through His death, but in this person in the parable's case, he will have to pay for all of his sins on his own by being tortured until it's all paid. When will that be accomplished? It'll take eternity.
Furthermore, in Malachi 4:1, etc the context will tell you that God's point there is that there will not be any residual influence (root) or legacy (branch) from sinners in heaven.
Throughout the OT & NT, "the realm (place/assembly) of the dead" always refers to the place where the condemned will end up and not the saints (those who are justified by faith in God). The place that the saints end up with is referred to as heaven / the land of the living / the dwelling place of the Most High / Paradise / New Jerusalem, etc, but not "the realm of the dead".
Moreover, Ecclesiastes was written by Solomon when he was "backsliding" (ie falling away from the faith). So he was being cynical about life and not hopeful about future with God. It's easy to take verses out of context and come up with non-Christian ideas from the book of Ecclesiastes for this reason.
Good question. “Salvation” is to be saved or rescued from the power and domination of sin in our life and from an eternity separated from God. Put simply, when born again Christians talk about being "saved", they're talking about being freed from the power of sin (I am not enslaved by sin any more) and being rescued from the ultimate consequence of sin (being eternally separated from God, ie hell, lake of fire).
Now as to the new born baby, the Bible does teach that all of mankind is born with sinful nature (tendency to rebel against God) because of Adam's sin. But we are only accountable for our own sins. When a person is too young to be aware of dishonoring their parents, stealing, or lying, etc, they're not accountable because "to whom much is given, much is required" and "the same measure you use to judge, you will be judged" (ie if you know enough to think of someone else as a lier, then you will be held accountable in the same way).
Since I work in a lab, I use razor blades for many different reasons. I used to keep one in my wallet for convenience. Then I forgot about it when I went through security at an airport, and I got through it no problem with my razor blade on the flight! This was right after 9/11 like early 2002, I think.
I switched from Firefox to Chromium last week too. The reason for me was that AdBlock Plus started allowing certain ads, which included commercials, etc on news sites. So there was no advantage in using FF any more. I'm fairly happy with Chromium so far even though for certain Flash tasks in Facebook tend to be less stable than in FF.
Whether you like the terms micro-evo and macro-evolution or not, medical doctors would never have to make a medical decision based on whether one kind of organism "evolves" into another kind (eg a prokaryotic bacteria "evolving" into a eukaryote), which some people (myself included) would call macro-evolution. Even development of anti-biotic resistance is unrelated to evolution since there is no introduction of new genes or new functions involved. Resistance is ALWAYS developed through dysfunction of certain genes that the antibiotic of interest was to take advantage of. So you're right "micro-evolution" is bit of a misnomer. Resistance development, etc should be just called variations (or strains) within a species (or a kind) since these observable phenomena simply have to do with genetic variations and loss of genetic integrity.
I've seen that people lie to me more often via text msg more often than via emails. Email seems more like an official documentation than text to most people, I guess even though both are logged and documented.
It doesn't matter whether your PhD certificate says Biology or Computer Science. The only things that people will care when they hire you after your PhD are your references, experience, skill set, and publications. I got my PhD from Scripps Inst. Oceanography and so my PhD paper says Oceanography, but for my PhD I worked on organic synthesis of naturally occurring medicinal compounds from the ocean. So I don't know anything about Oceanography. I'm an organic chemist. So I was hired as an organic chemist at another university.
People should also look at Pinguy OS as a Mint-alternative. It's my distro of choice at home at the moment. It is also an Ubuntu-based distro that is very polished and works "out of the box".
Oh I see, you got the story from the Wikipedia page. I never check Wikipedia for chemistry stuff... Anyway that's just an anecdote and I think my point still stands.
I only verbally heard about this from my colleagues, but I heard that it happened at one of the smaller startup biotech companies in Oregon and not at a college. So maybe we're talking about two different incidences? Having said that, since I only heard this verbally, I'm sure some of the details I heard or remember could be wrong.
Here's another piece of misinformation: elemental mercury is more dangerous than organic mercury compounds.
For instance, diethyl mercury is known to be one of the most dangerous neurotoxin known to mankind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylmercury). The consensus on the mechanism of action for this compound is that it's the oxidation state II mercury itself that is neurotoxic, but it's the alkyl groups that help it go across the blood-brain barrier. Look up the structure of thiomersal. It is an organic mercury compound that has an alkyl group directly on mercury, thereby giving access to the brain directly.
Similar compound, dimethyl mercury is also very notorious for its neurotoxicity. I do research in organic chemistry for living and a fellow organic chemist one time accidentally dropped a drop of Dimethyl mercury on her hand. It went through the gloves that she was wearing and onto her skin. Within several hours she was dead from what the doctors described in layman terms as "her brain melted". It is scary stuff. Some things about chemicals you don't necessarily have to do human clinical trial to predict that it'd be dangerous. If you have trained eyes you can just look at the chemical strcuture and predict its toxicity. However, as the good Book says, the love of money is a root of all evil. Once a big pharma company starts liking using a compound, they'll push for research that says it's safe even if it's not. That's just the way it is sadly.
Yeah. in fact, I'd get rid of all the depts except for depts of State, Treasury, HHS, Defense, VA, and Transportation. I doubt that we'd notice any difference in our daily life without the other depts.
I am an organic chemist whose salary comes entirely from federal research grants (mainly from NIH). However, the same kind of money can come from many different federal depts. I do development of new cancer drugs. Believe it or not, I could get money for that from DoD (don't ask me why DoD have grant money for cancer drugs), NFS, or the state and not just from NIH. There are so much redundancy in the fed govt that just because DoE goes, it doesn't mean all of the research activities done through them will cease. Stuff done through USGS, etc could be done through DoD or other depts in place.
Less redundancy will mean less bureaucracy and less money wasted. Also it will mean that researches won't have to submit different forms of grant applications to different depts (this sucks up so much time!) and their research may become more efficient! These are the important details that average nay-sayers won't understand. Go Ron Paul!
I've been reading your nonsense, and I must tell you. Go get an education.
I have a PhD in organic chemistry from UCSD. Do you consider that education? What higher degree could I have gotten?
2. Make a broad statement via the "begging the question" methodology
The entire source material of the bible is suspect, and is full of translation errors, etc since well, it was first translated.
We were discussing about whether the content of the Bible had been altered and whether any of the content have been proven wrong. So let's just use the desired conclusion as the starting point for the discussion: logical fallacy (beg the question).
3. Use lies when useful
Then it was translated some more, and then some of the "original" source documents were destroyed, so all of the "new" versions were then based on the original faulty translations....
A big plus if you can figure this out: Which books of the bible weren't mistranslated from Aramaic to Greek, and then into Latin, and then further mangled by "scribes" attempting to appease a few Roman Emperors and their view on what was and was not heresy as it applied to their divine right to rule.
All of the modern translations of the Bible (I only can testify about English and Japanese translations) were translated directly from Greek manuscripts for NT (possibly with an excpetion of parts of Matthew, which may have been written in Aramaic) and directly from Hebrew manuscripts for OT. I do keep hearing from skeptics that the Bible was translated many times successively, which is not true. I suspect that they get this idea from the Septuagint and Latin Vulgate. If the modern English translations come from those only, that accusation is partially true, but they don't. Besides, as I've stated, many Bible teachers consult the original Greek manuscripts before teaching so that any misguided English translation will not get in the way of teaching the Bible, and modern translations are very rarely off.
4. Switch the subject if you don't know the answer
As to which historical accounts in the bible have been proven wrong? That's the wrong question to ask. The better question is, "Given what we know of world history, exactly which historical events in the bible have ever been proven true?"
For starters, archeological evidence:
-Joshua in Egypt, Israel in wilderness, Jericho, king David, Solomon and their descendants who were kings, king Xerxes, king Cyrus, Babylonian conquer of Judah, Herod(s), Pilate, Mary & Martha, Churches mentioned in Acts.... I can't list them all
Scientific evidence
Although the Bible doesn't address scientific issues, there are somethings that are mentioned that we didn't know from science until the last few centuries: currents in the ocean, the earth being a sphere, water cycle in climate, mountain formations, origin of fossils, the earth suspended in space, material made of invisible particles, etc etc
There are tons more that I don't have time for. These are evidences in support of the authenticity of the Bible. Not proofs.
So, what part of the Bible has been PROVEN wrong? Especially the historical stuff. I'd love to know! Don't switch the Q!
If you plant to hate stupid Christians, these lessons in logical fallacy tactics should be helpful to you:)
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BPE = biphenyl ether
Their derivatives are used in plastics and as flame retardants in many different products. They're super common. Sorry no citation. I'm an organic chemist that have worked with those chemicals
I still don't get what you're saying no to... your link says 1 US cent is worth 0.83 yen, which I rounded to say 1 yen is worth about 1 cent. Are you saying I rounded up too much?
They should use aluminum like the Japanese 1 yen coin (which is worth about 1 cent US). I bet the metal would be worth less than 1 cent for sure.
You're right that 1Tim 3:1-8 spells out the qualifications for an elder (presbyter in Greek), but the original Greek word employed there in 1Tim 3:1 is "episkope", or an overseer, which is the Biblical definition of a pastor or an elder. The word elder refers to the quality of the man (he's older in the faith and mature) that the pastor is. The word overseer refers to what that pastor does: overseeing ministries. The word pastor (literally, a shepherd) refers to how you do that overseeing: spiritually feed, oversee, and protect the flock. But they all more or less refer to the same thing because you can't be a pastor without being an elder.
The reasoning for the "housing allowance" exemption for clergy has less to do with religious cause than with the business cost exemption. I don't know about other religions, but Christian pastors are expected to be hospitable and open up their homes for ministry purposes (1Timothy 3:2). I'm sure there are corrupted churches and pastors out there who don't do that. But I am a pastor and my wife and I do open up our home for ministering to people whether it's for using it as a place for small group Bible studies, counseling, fellowship, or a place to stay if needed. So it's for the same reason why you can get exemption if you use your home (or at least part of your home) as an office for your non-religious business.
BTW, I currently don't get paid a penny by my church although I spend ~40 hours/week for ministry. I have a separate full time job (researcher at a university) to provide for my family.
Yes! As someone who makes living doing research in medicinal chemistry, I can tell you that here's how our daily conversation at work goes:
"So whose methodology do you want to follow in accomplishing XYZ?"
"The paper from the ZYX lab?"
"Nah, I don't trust those guys. Let's go with the ABC paper"
I think you have to be in the field to understand just how much of the "trust" factor there is in the daily operation of scientific research.
"If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed, rather than having two hands, to go to hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched— where 'THEIR WORM DOES NOT DIE AND THE FIRE IS NOT QUENCHED.' And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life lame, rather than having two feet, to be cast into hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched— where 'THEIR WORM DOES NOT DIE AND THE FIRE IS NOT QUENCHED.' And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, rather than having two eyes, to be cast into hell fire— where 'THEIR WORM DOES NOT DIE AND THE FIRE IS NOT QUENCHED.'"
(Mark 9:43-48 NKJV)
His emphasis: the condemned people's worm will not die (there is no more death! per Revelation 20) and their fire will not be quenched. ie they will suffer for eternity.
Jesus' teaching on hell:
"Then his master, after he had called him, said to him, 'You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Should you not also have had compassion on your fellow servant, just as I had pity on you?' And his master was angry, and delivered him to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him."
(Matthew 18:32-34 NKJV)
This is a parable that teaches about heaven and hell. His point is that when God is offering such generous forgiveness to you and you refuse to forgive, you won't be forgiven and you will pay for all that you owe. In my case, the debt of punishment for my sins was paid for by Christ on the cross through His death, but in this person in the parable's case, he will have to pay for all of his sins on his own by being tortured until it's all paid. When will that be accomplished? It'll take eternity.
Furthermore, in Malachi 4:1, etc the context will tell you that God's point there is that there will not be any residual influence (root) or legacy (branch) from sinners in heaven.
Throughout the OT & NT, "the realm (place/assembly) of the dead" always refers to the place where the condemned will end up and not the saints (those who are justified by faith in God). The place that the saints end up with is referred to as heaven / the land of the living / the dwelling place of the Most High / Paradise / New Jerusalem, etc, but not "the realm of the dead".
Moreover, Ecclesiastes was written by Solomon when he was "backsliding" (ie falling away from the faith). So he was being cynical about life and not hopeful about future with God. It's easy to take verses out of context and come up with non-Christian ideas from the book of Ecclesiastes for this reason.
Well said, sir. Your post should be a sticky somewhere on /.
Good question. “Salvation” is to be saved or rescued from the power and domination of sin in our life and from an eternity separated from God. Put simply, when born again Christians talk about being "saved", they're talking about being freed from the power of sin (I am not enslaved by sin any more) and being rescued from the ultimate consequence of sin (being eternally separated from God, ie hell, lake of fire).
Now as to the new born baby, the Bible does teach that all of mankind is born with sinful nature (tendency to rebel against God) because of Adam's sin. But we are only accountable for our own sins. When a person is too young to be aware of dishonoring their parents, stealing, or lying, etc, they're not accountable because "to whom much is given, much is required" and "the same measure you use to judge, you will be judged" (ie if you know enough to think of someone else as a lier, then you will be held accountable in the same way).
Since I work in a lab, I use razor blades for many different reasons. I used to keep one in my wallet for convenience. Then I forgot about it when I went through security at an airport, and I got through it no problem with my razor blade on the flight! This was right after 9/11 like early 2002, I think.
I switched from Firefox to Chromium last week too. The reason for me was that AdBlock Plus started allowing certain ads, which included commercials, etc on news sites. So there was no advantage in using FF any more. I'm fairly happy with Chromium so far even though for certain Flash tasks in Facebook tend to be less stable than in FF.
I think we can all agree that the summary was poorly written and that mcarcosdumay owes us a cup of coffee
Whether you like the terms micro-evo and macro-evolution or not, medical doctors would never have to make a medical decision based on whether one kind of organism "evolves" into another kind (eg a prokaryotic bacteria "evolving" into a eukaryote), which some people (myself included) would call macro-evolution. Even development of anti-biotic resistance is unrelated to evolution since there is no introduction of new genes or new functions involved. Resistance is ALWAYS developed through dysfunction of certain genes that the antibiotic of interest was to take advantage of. So you're right "micro-evolution" is bit of a misnomer. Resistance development, etc should be just called variations (or strains) within a species (or a kind) since these observable phenomena simply have to do with genetic variations and loss of genetic integrity.
Good point. My point was just that my observation is people lie more often via texts.
I've seen that people lie to me more often via text msg more often than via emails. Email seems more like an official documentation than text to most people, I guess even though both are logged and documented.
It doesn't matter whether your PhD certificate says Biology or Computer Science. The only things that people will care when they hire you after your PhD are your references, experience, skill set, and publications. I got my PhD from Scripps Inst. Oceanography and so my PhD paper says Oceanography, but for my PhD I worked on organic synthesis of naturally occurring medicinal compounds from the ocean. So I don't know anything about Oceanography. I'm an organic chemist. So I was hired as an organic chemist at another university.
People should also look at Pinguy OS as a Mint-alternative. It's my distro of choice at home at the moment. It is also an Ubuntu-based distro that is very polished and works "out of the box".
Oh I see, you got the story from the Wikipedia page. I never check Wikipedia for chemistry stuff... Anyway that's just an anecdote and I think my point still stands.
I only verbally heard about this from my colleagues, but I heard that it happened at one of the smaller startup biotech companies in Oregon and not at a college. So maybe we're talking about two different incidences? Having said that, since I only heard this verbally, I'm sure some of the details I heard or remember could be wrong.
For instance, diethyl mercury is known to be one of the most dangerous neurotoxin known to mankind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylmercury). The consensus on the mechanism of action for this compound is that it's the oxidation state II mercury itself that is neurotoxic, but it's the alkyl groups that help it go across the blood-brain barrier. Look up the structure of thiomersal. It is an organic mercury compound that has an alkyl group directly on mercury, thereby giving access to the brain directly.
Similar compound, dimethyl mercury is also very notorious for its neurotoxicity. I do research in organic chemistry for living and a fellow organic chemist one time accidentally dropped a drop of Dimethyl mercury on her hand. It went through the gloves that she was wearing and onto her skin. Within several hours she was dead from what the doctors described in layman terms as "her brain melted". It is scary stuff. Some things about chemicals you don't necessarily have to do human clinical trial to predict that it'd be dangerous. If you have trained eyes you can just look at the chemical strcuture and predict its toxicity. However, as the good Book says, the love of money is a root of all evil. Once a big pharma company starts liking using a compound, they'll push for research that says it's safe even if it's not. That's just the way it is sadly.
I was wondering the same thing....
Yeah. in fact, I'd get rid of all the depts except for depts of State, Treasury, HHS, Defense, VA, and Transportation. I doubt that we'd notice any difference in our daily life without the other depts.
I am an organic chemist whose salary comes entirely from federal research grants (mainly from NIH). However, the same kind of money can come from many different federal depts. I do development of new cancer drugs. Believe it or not, I could get money for that from DoD (don't ask me why DoD have grant money for cancer drugs), NFS, or the state and not just from NIH. There are so much redundancy in the fed govt that just because DoE goes, it doesn't mean all of the research activities done through them will cease. Stuff done through USGS, etc could be done through DoD or other depts in place.
Less redundancy will mean less bureaucracy and less money wasted. Also it will mean that researches won't have to submit different forms of grant applications to different depts (this sucks up so much time!) and their research may become more efficient! These are the important details that average nay-sayers won't understand. Go Ron Paul!
1. Insult the stupid Christian
I've been reading your nonsense, and I must tell you. Go get an education.
I have a PhD in organic chemistry from UCSD. Do you consider that education? What higher degree could I have gotten?
2. Make a broad statement via the "begging the question" methodology
The entire source material of the bible is suspect, and is full of translation errors, etc since well, it was first translated.
We were discussing about whether the content of the Bible had been altered and whether any of the content have been proven wrong. So let's just use the desired conclusion as the starting point for the discussion: logical fallacy (beg the question).
3. Use lies when useful
Then it was translated some more, and then some of the "original" source documents were destroyed, so all of the "new" versions were then based on the original faulty translations....
A big plus if you can figure this out: Which books of the bible weren't mistranslated from Aramaic to Greek, and then into Latin, and then further mangled by "scribes" attempting to appease a few Roman Emperors and their view on what was and was not heresy as it applied to their divine right to rule.
All of the modern translations of the Bible (I only can testify about English and Japanese translations) were translated directly from Greek manuscripts for NT (possibly with an excpetion of parts of Matthew, which may have been written in Aramaic) and directly from Hebrew manuscripts for OT. I do keep hearing from skeptics that the Bible was translated many times successively, which is not true. I suspect that they get this idea from the Septuagint and Latin Vulgate. If the modern English translations come from those only, that accusation is partially true, but they don't. Besides, as I've stated, many Bible teachers consult the original Greek manuscripts before teaching so that any misguided English translation will not get in the way of teaching the Bible, and modern translations are very rarely off.
4. Switch the subject if you don't know the answer
As to which historical accounts in the bible have been proven wrong? That's the wrong question to ask. The better question is, "Given what we know of world history, exactly which historical events in the bible have ever been proven true?"
For starters, archeological evidence:
-Joshua in Egypt, Israel in wilderness, Jericho, king David, Solomon and their descendants who were kings, king Xerxes, king Cyrus, Babylonian conquer of Judah, Herod(s), Pilate, Mary & Martha, Churches mentioned in Acts.... I can't list them all
Scientific evidence
Although the Bible doesn't address scientific issues, there are somethings that are mentioned that we didn't know from science until the last few centuries: currents in the ocean, the earth being a sphere, water cycle in climate, mountain formations, origin of fossils, the earth suspended in space, material made of invisible particles, etc etc
There are tons more that I don't have time for. These are evidences in support of the authenticity of the Bible. Not proofs.
So, what part of the Bible has been PROVEN wrong? Especially the historical stuff. I'd love to know! Don't switch the Q!
If you plant to hate stupid Christians, these lessons in logical fallacy tactics should be helpful to you :)